Well, that was fun. SXSW is over, and boy, we had a good time. Not only did we win Accelerator, we also caught a ton of cool shows, and met some incredibly nice and interesting people there.

Looks like everyone’s doing a Best of SXSW writeup, so here is ours:

We noticed everyone at SXSW is basically just trying to get noticed. By being on or hosting panels, by playing shows, or by wearing funny hats. Of course, some ways to get noticed are more amusing than others, and we thought we’d honor some of these.

So we decided to hand out individual Best of SXSW awards to noteworthy people. And this post is the first in a series that documents the winners. Stay tuned for more!

(Example of our awards. They come with a free song.)

This is Bridget, one of the throng of helpful SXSW volunteers:

After panels ended, it was usually time to head over to the Registrant’s Lounge across the street from the Austin Hilton, which was basically a fenced-off park with free booze for badgeholders. Good place to unwind, think about something other than blogging and social media for a change, and get some sun for the first time in the day.

Too bad it only opened at 5pm. But not to worry – there was Bridget, who let us in early because she was just nice like that. She also hooked us up with an extra drink coupon. So the Popcuts Award for Best SXSW Staff / Volunteer was an easy choice for us!

Veteran music recommendation researcher Paul Lamere (ex Sun Labs, now with the Echo Nest) led a panel named “Help! My iPod thinks I’m emo!”. It was both insightful and hilarious at times. Our favorite slide was his example of what a “freakommendation” is: People who buy Pat Robertson’s book also shopped for The Ultimate Guide for Anal Sex for Men.

So Paul totally earned the Popcuts award for Most Hilarious Panelist.

For the very last timeslot of SXSW Interactive, we headed to a roundtable discussion titled Music 2.0 = Music Discovery Chaos? Also in the audience was Tim Malbon, who caught our attention because he dared to ask the question of questions (and we have to paraphrase here): “Is music discovery really such a huge problem? I don’t see people running around on the street screaming ‘I can’t discover new music!’”.

So Tim got our award for Ballsiest Question to a Panelist.

Speaking of music recommendation: A few months ago in Berlin, we ran into Petar Djekic at the booth of a cool new music recommendation startup called mufin. We saw Petar again here at SXSW and hung out for a while. And after getting us into Berlin Fest (which featured free beer and sausages), and giving us tips on a ton of other fun stuff, we decided Petar deserves the  award for Extreme Generosity.

At Berlin Fest, we met Judith Govey from the British Music Embassy. Their mission is to promote British music in the rest of the world, which sounds like a pretty kickass thing to do. Judith received our award for Most Pieces of Flare because we noticed she was wearing way more than the minimum of 17! Because Judith knows that people can get a song anywhere. She even gave us a button to keep.

We’ll be posting more of the award-winning people we met in Austin!  Signing off from Berkeley!

We’re thrilled to announce that Popcuts was declared winner of the music category at SXSW Accelerator yesterday! The jury found Popcuts most likely to succeed and disrupt the current music distribution landscape.

The contest was hosted by former Wired editor Brad King and by Guy Kawasaki. Judges included iLike CEO Ali Partovi and Elliott Hurst of supernova.com.

SXSW Accelerator was designed to discover the best young talent and the most creative new ideas. Other category winners include Weardrobe (social networking), TubeMogul (online video) and Ribbit (innovative web technologies).

For press inquiries, please contact press@popcuts.com.

Photo gallery of Popcuts at the award ceremony (courtesy of the Austin American-Statesman)

This morning, we released an all-new, shiny user interface for Popcuts. We’ve spiced up the look and implemented lots of little and big improvements to usability, functionality and performance.

The general site structure stays the same, but the new look gives us a foundation to roll out new features over the next couple of months.

One thing we’ve learned is that it’s a lot more fun to browse music by looking at cover art. So we increased the size of song covers in our list views and put a cover zoom function everywhere. Still to come: An entirely, cover-based section to browse music.

We unified the way the rewards for a given song are presented: In the new version, a little dollar icon next to the preview button brings up a table with a “profit preview” for the song.

For those who like to buy whole albums, we’ve added a shortcut for that.

By popular request, we moved an overview of the newest releases to front page. And we added a news ticker with the most recent user events there, too (such as reviews, purchases, recommendations etc.). Now, you can get a sense of what’s going on on the site just by glancing at the Popcuts front page.

Finally, we brought back an old favorite of ours: the slightly tilted logo. In combination with the dancing equalizer bars, we feel it’s much more suited for a site that’s all about music.

We thank you, our users, for all your support and hope you enjoy the new site! And do let us know if you’ll be at SXSW!

Team Popcuts

P.S.: Thanks, Simon Beckmann, for laying down the design vision, implementing countless screens, navigating around IE6 hell and just being of great help!